No. Germany can recognize Jewish lives and the worldwide Jewish community without needing to play into the hands of a rightwing apartheid state and getting involved smack in the middle of their political dispute. This isn’t hard; it’s like being able to say Black Lives Matter without having to support and endorse the controversial policies of Louis Farrakhan.

And 15% of the world’s prisoners.

This is idiotic. Gandhi hated that Pakistan split off and said that he recognized their existence but would never recognize their “right” to exist.

That’s not even an international policy. Does Castile have a right to exist? Does Kashmir? Does Kurdistan? Why doesn’t Germany demand the same for others?

Are you expecting a joke to actually discuss both sides of a topic?

i think you may have missed the joke if you read it too fast

Reddit was in a frenzy over the claim on October 7 itself. The major basis behind it was a video of an Israeli prisoner with what appeared to be blood on the back of her pants. The major worldnews sub banned anyone who questioned the claim. Weeks later it turned out that the blood on her bottom was because she had cut her ankle and was sitting or kneeling in the back of the truck and got it on her pants, not that she had been raped like many assumed.

Hamas doesn’t exactly pick the most civilian-free areas to set up their base of operations either.

IDF headquarters is in the center of a civilian area in Tel Aviv. By Israeli logic, is firing missiles at Tel Aviv a legitimate military objective? Netanyahu’s bunker is in a crowded civilian area too, why is he using human shields?

The issue here is that the IDF believes Israeli lives are FAR more important than Palestinian lives. How much? They actually have calculated how many Palestinian civilian deaths are acceptable to protect one Israeli soldier.

Netanyahu said since November that even if all hostages were released he was going to invade anyway and not stop the war.

Look at it this way, did the CDC ever openly contradict Trump? They had private disagreements behind closed doors according to a lot of anonymous media reporting, but since the CDC falls under the jurisdiction of HHS the civil service employees fall under the management of political appointees. In contrast, the Fed are a more independent agency designed to be more insulated from politicians and they had no trouble publicly saying no to a president.

I feel like people didn’t learn about this in school or remember it, so let me give a brief summary. Government agencies are staffed from the bottom up by civil service employees. They are hired and promoted based on their technical competence and expertise and can offer expert opinion and manage regulations. They are apolitical and keep their jobs in between presidential administrations. The very top and highest level jobs are politically appointed jobs by the White House and they change when administrations change. Their job is to set the policies for their respective departments and carry them out in accordance with the president’s wishes. If you’d like another example, the civil servants at the department of labor compile statistics on employment and unemployment rates and the president’s Secretary of Labor manages the department at the top and helps set departmental agenda.

My point is that the departments and agencies are not purely independent bodies and by design they are under the control of politicians. We have accountability by both electing a president who controls the staffing and high level decisions and Congress who oversees the functioning and results of each agency. I never said all presidents were equal on this but each one has a lot of control over what each agency PUBLICLY says. Biden essentially controls what ICE or CIA says to the press even if they privately warn him about changes in migrant numbers or WMD programs abroad.

“I don’t see a right to breathe air in the constitution either!”

lol, as a political scientist that’s ridiculous and false. The Judicial Branch does not have a role in impeachment aside from Chief Justice having a role in the Senate trial. Impeachment is a political process conducted by the Legislative Branch. And impeachment “for high crimes and misdemeanors” does not include wielding his congressionally-authorized power to condition aid or hold aid when the country in question violates the Leahy Laws (which require the US to hold military aid to a country that violates human rights without accountability.

Where did you even hear such a phony claim?

Close. All the postwar analysis including mentions in the Senate Report on Iraqi WMD Intelligence and independent reporting (Slow Burn podcast did a good summary) discussed how analysts were pressured to write reports backing up claims of WMDs or pre-assuming WMDs existed and that anyone who wrote reports otherwise was reprimanded from above and their career impacted negatively in a way that others saw and tried not to repeat. Some Bush supporters tried to make the case that the CIA came up with WMD claims on their own and Bush was unwittingly dragged into a war reluctantly because of the bad intelligence and that’s a laughable claim; it was the White House pressuring reports to say what they wanted to hear. Cheney personally set up an office in Langley to drive that point home.

My point still stands; the top levels of the Executive Branch can influence pretty far down into the bureaucrat levels. The White House can pressure the CIA to issue reports that favor the existing policy and bury papers that contradict it. The State Department can issue reports that favor the administration’s foreign policy objectives and bury reports that contradict it. The Trump (and Biden) administrations wielded control over the CDC and issued guidelines that sometimes went against what independent public health experts and the medical community were recommending; promoting ideas with weak evidence and burying other ideas with strong evidence because they contradicted the political policies at the time (see also needle exchange policies vs evidence based public health community recommendations).

Sanctions on just 4 people? There’s hundreds of thousands of illegal settlers, thousands of attacks a year, and hundreds of Palestinians dead in the last 12 months even before October 7. Even 4 per settlement is insultingly low, not 4 in all of the OPT. You can’t even round up to the nearest 10 people; even you know this is a worthless gesture that is nothing more than a political talking point. And Biden walked back those sanctions after pressure from Israel’s finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich; Israeli banks can now do business with the sanctioned individuals in a special exemption.

So you couldn’t show me any sanctions. Got it.

“The prime minister himself insisted there would be no permanent truce until Hamas’s military and governing capabilities were destroyed and all hostages released.”

You are giving me links that quote advisors that say Netanyahu is privately agreeing to the plan, but has not done so publicly. The NYTimes and your BBC link is talking about how Netanyahu is struggling with cabinet divisions right now, and if he agrees his coalition may collapse as the extreme right under Ben-Gvir and others pull out of the cabinet.

So you’re giving me rumors and private conjecture, Israel has NOT publicly accepted the deal at this time despite Biden optimistically saying they will this time, like he said multiple times this year including on Jimmy Fallon that a ceasefire was only days away.

No they haven’t. Israel has not agreed to the ceasefire and Netanyahu today threw up a bunch of objections to the offer.

And again, please list any sanctions Biden has done against any illegal Israeli settlements. There are none. I’ll wait for you to show me any that prove me wrong.

Netanyahu has said for the last 6 months that returning all hostages is not sufficient for a ceasefire, AND that even if Hamas surrendered tomorrow and gave up all the hostages he would not end the war. That’s one of the reasons for Biden’s Friday speech.

Biden is pretending that Israel is not acting in bad faith even though it’s obvious. Look at how Israel is sending literal tanks into Rafah and 60+ airstrikes a day but claiming this is minor, and Biden doesn’t have the courage to call them on their BS.

Your link merely says that Biden declared the settlements illegal, with no sanctions behind it. He is not restricting US aid money to the settlements or settlers, nor is he sanctioning businesses doing business in these illegal settlements. Your article points out that Israel defied Biden’s legal opinion and is expanding settlements anyway without US doing anything to stop it. Once again, where are the sanctions?

No. It’s more likely Biden leaned on the State Department to bury their findings. The organization is controlled by political appointees, remember. Typically their reports are a fait accompli. And no, there’s zero talk by Republicans on impeaching Biden over Israel, so you keep repeating this idea with no backing or evidence behind it. The president has broad discretionary powers in foreign policy and can restrict aid as he sees fit, and the courts including SCOTUS have consistently ruled in favor of the presidency on the issue.

Israel is absolutely working in bad faith, and Biden is enabling it. See Biden’s red line not being breached by airstrikes and literal tanks into Rafah according to Israeli government and with Biden rushing to agree after the fact, with excuses that tanks are merely on roads or that the airstrikes are limited under a new just-made up-threshold.

What in the last 7 months gives you so much faith in the politically-controlled State Department that they’d publicly reach a conclusion Biden doesn’t want?

Biden restored US policy, he didn’t sanction Israel.